Dancing After Hours (13 page)

Now she talked of their going to the ranch and staying there while the contractor removed the second floor and put those rooms on the ground. Robert believed his knees would be as they had always been until they were broken, and while Lydia talked about Arizona, he was eating without hunger but to gain strength, or pushing a urinal between the casts on his thighs, or feeling pain from his feet to his crotch. Every day and night he thought of men he had seen wounded in war. He had never told Lydia about them, and he did not tell her now. How many times had he yelled for corpsmen, and controlled his horror, and done everything he could to help, and everything correctly? He knew now that his horror had kept him separate from the torn meat and broken bones that an instant ago were a man, strong and quick; and kept him, too, from telling Lydia. Now his own pain opened him up, and pity flowed from him, washed timeless over those broken men lying on the earth.

On a Saturday morning in his fifth week at home, while they were eating breakfast, snow began to fall. When Lydia walked to the store, he watched the snow through the dining room window, then slept. He woke to the sound of Lydia’s boots on the front steps. He looked to his right and behind him at the door as she opened it: she was looking down at her gloved hand on the knob, snow was quickly melting on her shoulders and beret and hair, her cheeks were flushed, and her
brightened eyes were seeing something that was not in the room, some image or memory, and fear rose from his stomach, he felt shackled to the bed, and suddenly he was sweating. Then she looked at him, and came quickly to him, took his hand, and said: “What is it?”

“My legs.”

“Did you take something?”

“No.”

Her brown shoulder bag was damp, bulging at her side; always he had teased her about crammed purses; now this one seemed filled with secrets that could destroy him. She placed a palm on his brow.

“It’s passing,” he said. “It’ll be all right.”

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Try something.”

“I will.”

She smelled of snow and winter air. She unzipped her parka and climbed the stairs. He shut his eyes and saw nothing; but nameless fear rushed in his blood. He listened to Lydia’s footsteps going to the bathroom. She was wearing her moccasins. She flushed the toilet, washed her hands, and he watched the head of the stairs, focused on the spot where her face would appear; then it was there, descending, and in her eyes and mouth he saw nothing. He had been in bed for too long—this fear must be madness—and when she helped him onto the chair, he looked away from her, at the dining room window, the falling snow.

He watched it while she was in the kitchen. She brought black bean soup she had made the night before, and a green salad and hot rolls. He dipped a spoon into the soup and raised it to his mouth and
swallowed; he put the spoon down and ate a piece of roll, then a slice of cucumber. He kept doing this, his head turned to watch her smile and talk and chew, until he had eaten everything. Then she helped him onto the bed, and cleared the table; he listened to her putting the dishes in the dishwasher. He closed his eyes before she came into the living room; he felt her looking at him as she walked to the stairs; then she climbed them and went down the hall to her room. He did not want to be awake, and soon he slept. When he woke, snow was still falling; it was gathering wetly on the pine branches; the house was quiet and as dark as it could be in midafternoon with so many windows. He turned on the lamp. Pain squeezed his bones, and his heart was breaking. Lydia’s face when she opened the door at noon was the face that for years he had given her: that blush of her cheeks, and light in her eyes. He knew she had a lover.

He listened to the house. She was in it, but where was she? She could be in her room, the door closed, talking on the phone to—He could not imagine a man. He wanted to feel rage and jealousy, but all he felt was absolute helplessness and dread and sorrow. He held the phone and slowly lifted the receiver and listened to the dial tone as he stared at the snow. He opened the table’s top drawer, got the bottle of Percodan, and shook one into his palm. He saw himself as he would look to Lydia: a man in pain, lying on his back with casts on his legs, reaching for the glass of water beside him; a man whose stinking shit she cleaned from the commode and wiped from his body. For nearly three hours the images had waited, perched and watching just beyond his ken, and now they gathered and assaulted
him, and he breathed deeply and fast, and opened and closed his hands, and saw in the snow and the pines Lydia making love.

The hall upstairs was darkened; the only sound in the house was his breath. All his life with her he had believed he knew where she was. When he was at a desk eight miles away from her or drinking coffee from a canteen cup at dawn in Vietnam, he imagined her in their home, or within its natural boundaries. She was at a wives’ luncheon or tea, or in a restaurant for lunch with one or two women; she was walking—she had always loved a long walk alone and, since their courtship, had walked more miles than Robert, an infantryman, and this was a family joke; she was sitting with a cup of tea before the fire, or iced tea on the lawn; she was buying dresses, blouses, sweaters, bracelets, necklaces with the endearing pleasure he saw in his daughters, too, before they could spell what they wore; she was making peanut butter sandwiches for the children home from school; she was talking on the phone held between her shoulder and ear while she sautéed onions. In his three years of retirement, his view of her had not changed; he did not know that till now. He had been hunting and fishing with new friends, had bought the mare and boarded her, read books, written letters to friends, and waked some mornings feeling surprised, disoriented, and tardy. He had worked each day with his body and mind, and at sunset had turned to Lydia’s merry brown eyes and the mingled scents from her bath. He knew her face when she slept; when she woke in the morning; when she was pale and sick; when fatigue hung like weights from her eyes and cheeks. Yet when he handed her a martini and looked at her red
lips and shaded eyelids, and smelled her, he did not think of bottles and tubes and boxes on her dressing table. This face, these smells, were her at sunset. He called into the darkness, his voice soft and high, cresting on his fear: “Lydia?”

He could not bear the pain in his legs, not with this, and he called her name again and again and again, and the nothing he heard was so quiet, and he listened so intently to it, he believed he could hear the snow falling. It would fall until it covered the house, until the power lines broke from their poles, and he would die here, not from cold or hunger or thirst, but because he was alone and could not move. Then he was sobbing into his hands, and he heard only that and so was startled as by an angel of death when Lydia’s hands gripped his wrists and strongly and gently pulled his hands from his eyes; then her voice was in his heart: “Bob,” she said. “Bobby.”

He held her. He pulled himself upward and groaned as the pain tightened and turned in his broken bones, he pressed his face to her breasts, and Lydia’s arms came around him. Her hands moved up and down his back. He heard her tears when she said: “I fell asleep. I didn’t hear you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry this happened to you. I’m so sorry about your
knees.
”

Grief shook her body in his arms. He wanted to stand and hold her face at his chest, stroke her hair, speak softly to her. He sniffed tears and swallowed them, moved his head from her breast, looked up at her wet cheeks and eyes and trembling mouth, and he lowered his arms and with a hand patted the sheet beside him.

“Here,” he said. “Here. Lie down.”

She lay beside him, and the first touch of her weight on the bed moved his legs, and he clenched his teeth and swallowed a groan and kept silent. Her head lay on his right bicep, and he brought that hand to her face and hair. His fingers lightly rubbed her tears. He closed his eyes and in that darkness saw snow, and felt his legs; but above them he was emptied of pain, and now he did not see snow or darkness, but sunlight in La Jolla, and Lydia as a small golden-haired child on that vast and shaded lawn; then he saw her gray and thin and dying in pain. In the orthopedic ward people screamed, and many nights he had pushed the call button again and again and finally cried out for a nurse to give him morphine. He did not know whether or not there were atheists in foxholes; he believed now there must have been many in field hospitals, and in the naval hospitals afterward, and in the hospital he had come home from so long ago. In Korea and Vietnam, it was Lydia he prayed to, if turning in fear and loneliness to someone was prayer. Certainly it was hope and faith and love. He felt these now, with his eyes closed, holding Lydia, seeing her weeping above his bed, her body slowly falling toward him as he patted the sheet; seeing the lines of her face she said were from smoking and the sun, but they were time, too. She loved him; and if he had never known precisely where she was, she had finally always been here. Then her head and body jerked and she was keening, and he opened his eyes to immense sound, and the lamplight, the darkness in the dining room, the snow: “You won’t be able to climb those fucking stairs.
You
can. But it’ll be awful, it’s awful, it’s awful, you don’t know how badly you’re
hurt
, Bob, you don’t know, because it’s you, it’s you—”

She stopped. He waited until she was no longer crying and her breath was slow again, then said softly: “I know about you.”

“You do?”

“I know you’re having an affair.”

“That’s all it is. It just ended.”

“Because my legs are broken?”

“I don’t know. Yes. Because your legs are broken.” She held her breath for a moment, then released it. “It’s not my first.”

“No.”

“I need a cigarette for this.”

His body started to sit up, to rise from the bed and climb the stairs to get her purse. Then she was gone, to her room, then the bathroom, and she came down with fresh makeup and her cigarettes, and lay beside him and looked at his eyes. She said: “I’ve never loved anyone else.”

“I’ve cheated, too.”

“I know.”

“What do you know?”

“Japan. Okinawa. Hong Kong. Vietnam. Maybe some in the States.”

“Not in the States. How did you know?”

“I’m your wife.”

“Why didn’t I know?”

“Because I’m your wife. How much do you want to hear?”

“I want to hear everything, and go to Arizona, and sleep in the same bed with you.”

Now his heartbreak was like the pain in his legs: it was part of him, but he could breathe with it, think with it, listen and see with it. Until the light outside
faded, and darkness gathered around the lamp at the bed, her voice rose softly from the pillow, and snow moved outside the window. When she told him she had never had a lover while he was at war, Robert said: “In case I got killed?”

“Yes. I just didn’t know I had to include riding a horse,” and laughter came to them as suddenly as weeping had. It took their breath, it drew tears from them, it shook his body and hurt his bones, and he held Lydia and laughed.

A week later, they were in Arizona, watching purple spread over a mountain range in the sunset. They were on the patio; she lit coals on the grill and stepped back from the flames, then poured martinis from the pitcher and sat beside him. He looked at the mountain and sun and sky, then looked at her eyes and told her of maimed and dying boys, of holding them while their lives flowed out of them, onto snow, grass, mud. He told her of terror that came like thunder after lightning, after the explosions and gunfire, after everything was done. He told her of his terror under the horse, and on the bed in their living room when he was alone in the house. He said: “I’m glad that damned horse fell on me. It made me lie still in one place and look at you.”

“I hope you haven’t seen too much.”

“There’s never too much. There’s not enough time.”

“No.”

“Time makes us the same, you and me. That’s all I know.”

He knew this: sunlight on the twist of lemon in her glass as she lifted it by the stem and brought it to her red lips. On the day the snow fell till midnight, she had made no promises, and had not asked any of him. He
did not want promises. They were words and feelings wafting about in a season he or Lydia may not live to see. He wanted only to know what had happened and what was happening now, to see that: brilliant as the sky, hot as the sun, bright as Lydia’s eyes.

L
EE TRAMBATH WAS A FIFTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD
restaurant manager, with three ex-wives and five children. He was a slender, dark-haired man with a trimmed beard that was mostly gray, and he lived and worked in a small Massachusetts town, near the sea. The children were from his first two marriages, three daughters and two sons, grown now and spread up and down the eastern seaboard from Charleston to Portland, all in places he liked to visit. None of them was married; they all had lovers. Lee was on good terms with the two mothers of his children; time had healed him, had allowed him to forget whatever he and the women had done to each other, or removed the precision of pain from his memory; and sometimes, sitting alone in his apartment or strolling on the boardwalk
along the river flowing a mile or so to the ocean, he wished as a boy does: that in some way his first marriage had never ended, yet his second had occurred so the daughter and son from that one would be on the earth; and that he and the two women and five children were one family. This frequent wish was never erotic: his images were of him and the two women and five children in living rooms, dining rooms, on lawns. It was the third wife, and the women in their forties whom he dated after his divorce from her, who made him refer to his last marriage as absolutely his last.

His third wife was nearly forty when they married; she had two daughters who were aging her with their listless work in high school, slovenly lives at home, strong-willed disobedience, and unsavory boyfriends, whose tight clothing seemed only a cover to get from their cars to the house and, with the girls, back to their cars. Lee did what he could, with tender hesitance; the girls’ father had moved to Houston when they were six and eight, and sent them checks on birthdays and at Christmas. Lee silently predicted pregnancies, abortions, and a few years of too much drinking and cocaine. Then after college, which even they would be able to attend and muddle through, they would work at jobs to pay for clothes, cars, and apartments; and, like most people, they would settle softly into mundane lives. For Lee, the household was often frenzied and barely tolerable, with three females crying at once, but he was forty-nine, he had spent most of his adult life with families, and he could bear it.